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Category: Dharma & Philosophy

Hindu thought, darshana schools, saints and acharyas, spirituality

  • Purusha, Prakriti & Karmic Flow — Dr. Robert Svoboda (Talk Notes)

    Talk notes · Speakers: Dr. Robert Svoboda with Rahul Dewan · Platform: Sangam Talks — notes with full credit; no transcript is published for this talk, so these are viewing notes drawing on the talk’s own introduction.

    Why this conversation

    Dr. Robert Svoboda is among the few Westerners formally trained in Ayurveda under an Indian vaidya, with decades in Jyotisha, Vedic chanting, and yoga under master teachers — and on Sangam’s own popularity board, his conversations are the most-drawn card in the deck. This second part of the Ayurveda dialogue goes beneath the medicine to its metaphysical architecture: what must be true about persons and reality for Ayurveda to make sense at all.

    What to listen for

    1. Purusha and Prakriti — consciousness and manifestation — approached through the Amritanubhava’s teaching, the frame on which authentic practice rests.
    2. Parampara as living transmission: vidya passing guru-to-shishya as a relationship, not a download — and the closing principle the page itself states: sincere desire for knowledge “will eventually attract the right teacher — because all these vidyas need humans to survive.”
    3. Kula Devata and Ishta Devata are not the same — and the conversation’s most personal thread: how a family displaced in Partition lost its kula-devata connection, and what such loss means.
    4. A caution inside the mysticism: past-life regression’s tendency toward “glamorous self-aggrandising narratives rather than truth” — discrimination applied even to the attractive parts of the tradition.

    Our note

    This is the metaphysical backdrop for two of our lanes at once: Dharma & Philosophy and the Ayurveda shelf — and its parampara theme is the deep logic of everything our mentor platform exists for: vidyas survive through people.

    Credits

    Watch the full talk: on YouTube (Sangam Talks channel).
    Speakers: Dr. Robert Svoboda with Rahul Dewan.
    Original talk: Sangam Talks. Framing quoted from the talk page; full attribution.

  • Nyaya & Vaisheshika: The Logic Schools — Dr. Ram Chandra Sharma (Talk Notes)

    Talk notes · Speaker: Dr. Ram Chandra Sharma · Platform: Sangam Talks (Sangam IKS Series, an MoE IKS-division project) — notes with full credit; no transcript is published for this talk, so these are viewing notes rather than a quoted summary.

    Why this talk

    Of the six classical darshanas, Nyaya and Vaisheshika are the pair modern audiences underestimate most — and need first. Nyaya built India’s formal logic: the five-membered inference, the taxonomy of valid and bogus reasons, the debate protocols that governed every serious intellectual contest for centuries. Vaisheshika built its ontology: the categories of reality, and an atomism reasoned out long before instruments could see. Together they are the tradition’s analytic engine — the schools every other school had to answer.

    What to listen for

    1. How the two schools pair: Vaisheshika’s inventory of what exists, Nyaya’s rules for how we know it.
    2. The pramana framework in action — this talk is the spoken companion to our Pramanas article.
    3. The series’ own frame: as its introduction puts it, “The Bharatiya way is sustainable and strives for the welfare of all” — IKS as jnan, vignan, and jeevan darshan together, not museum pieces.

    Our note

    The Sangam IKS Series carries an official mandate to disseminate the knowledge systems; our shelf’s job is to give each talk a readable doorway. This one opens onto our Dharma & Philosophy shelf, where the darshanas are being built out lane by lane.

    Credits

    Watch the full talk: on YouTube (Sangam Talks channel).
    Speaker: Dr. Ram Chandra Sharma.
    Original talk: Sangam Talks — Sangam IKS Series. Full attribution; series framing quoted from the talk page.

  • Indian Philosophical Traditions

    Indic Lectures — session notes · Indic Warriors lecture series

    Indian philosophy is not a single doctrine but a two-thousand-year argument conducted with extraordinary manners: each school stating its opponents’ case before answering it. This lecture provides the map — the six classical darshanas, their questions (what exists, how we know, what liberation means), and the debate lines that connect Nyaya’s logic to Vedanta’s metaphysics to Mimamsa’s philosophy of language.

    Designed as an entry point: no Sanskrit prerequisites, generous with examples, and closing with a guided reading path for whichever school a listener finds themselves unable to stop thinking about.

    Attend or revisit: session schedules and recordings are announced on the Indic Lectures page; related reading grows on the Dharma & Philosophy shelf.

    Credits: lecture programme by Indic Warriors; notes by the editorial team.

  • How I Became a Hindu by Sita Ram Goel

    Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

    Most conversion stories move toward a new faith; Sita Ram Goel’s moves toward clarity. How I Became a Hindu (Voice of India) is the autobiography of one of independent India’s most formidable polemical minds — and its power lies in how little it asks the reader to take on trust.

    Goel begins where much of his generation began: a brilliant student in 1940s Calcutta, persuaded that Marxism was simply what intelligence looked like. The book’s early chapters reconstruct that certainty from the inside — the moral seriousness of it, the intellectual glamour — which is precisely what makes the later unravelling credible. The turn comes not through mysticism but through evidence: the realities of communist practice, and the patient influence of his friend and lifelong collaborator Ram Swarup, who kept asking the questions the ideology could not survive.

    What Goel returns to is not a ritual identity but a civilizational one: dharma as a framework spacious enough to hold inquiry, plural enough to refuse totalitarian answers, and old enough to have seen every ‘new’ idea before. The closing chapters, where he weighs what Hindu society must relearn about defending itself intellectually, read as the founding notes of the publishing project — Voice of India — that would occupy the rest of his life.

    Who should read it: every student who suspects that the ideas they have inherited about India were someone else’s conclusions; readers of our Dharma & Philosophy shelf; and anyone tracing how the modern Indic intellectual resurgence began. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

    Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Sita Ram Goel, How I Became a Hindu (Voice of India; expanded edition 1993).